All posts tagged laszlo andor

The European Union Friday cited modest progress in the living conditions of Roma throughout the continent, but a much-anticipated report overall painted a continued bleak picture for Europe’s largest minority.

European Commissioners Viviane Reding and Laszlo Andor released the first assessment of member states’ efforts since the EU directed countries in 2011 to adopt Roma “action plans.”

“We have seen many small miracles,” Ms. Reding said, citing an increase in early childhood education in particular, at an EU summit on the Roma. “If you add up the small miracles, you have some real change.” Read More »

The obstacles preventing the euro zone from becoming a workable currency union are huge.

Many people have said it, but rarely (or never) do you hear it from a senior European Union official. Yet that’s basically what László Andor, the EU’s employment and social affairs commissioner, wrote Friday in a paper prepared for the European Policy Centre, a Brussels think tank.

Mr. Andor, a soft-spoken Hungarian economist, takes aim at “internal devaluation,” the process of falling wages and prices that is supposed to restore the competitiveness of the euro-zone periphery relative to Germany and other countries of the euro-zone core. EU authorities and the International Monetary Fund have decided it’s the only route to recovery for the periphery without the option of currency devaluation.

But it’s probably not going to work, Mr. Andor wrote. “Internal devaluation can produce results under certain speciﬁc circumstances, i.e. in small open economies enjoying sustained demand from trading partners, but it certainly cannot represent a general model for a large union whose overall exports and imports are balanced.”

About Real Time Brussels

The Wall Street Journal’s Brussels blog is produced by the Brussels bureau of The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires. The bureau has been headed since 2009 by Stephen Fidler, who was previously a correspondent and editor for the Financial Times and Reuters. Also posting regularly: Matthew Dalton, Viktoria Dendrinou, Tom Fairless, Naftali Bendavid, Laurence Norman, Gabriele Steinhauser and Valentina Pop.